mortiz055

As Dan Mitchell has been reminding us,  UCOP has appointed a Task Force to implement the Regents agreement to reduce pension benefits for future employees.  As a result of the Committee of Two, UCOP has agreed to lower the amount of employee salary that can be counted towards UCRP to approximately $117,000.  They are proposing that some form of hybrid defined benefit/defined contribution plan be created to allow employees to save above that $117,000 limit.  UCOP is also proposing  that  an all-defined contribution (DC) plan be developed that would allow future employees to opt out from the defined benefit plan entirely . UCOP insists that the " New retirement benefits options are being developed as a result of the  budget agreement  between UC and state leaders, which included nearly $500 million to help pay down UC’s unfunded pension liability. " But there are several issues that need to be raised about this claim. 1.  UCOP refers to the n...

The Democratic candidates public college plans are more interesting than most coverage has implied (brief comparisons are here ). They are all variations of "Debt-Free College" proposals, to use candidate Martin O'Malley's term , structured in part as federal bailouts of state universities.  They are grossly underfunded, but they establish new principles and could launch a new political struggle for public eduction reconstruction. My suspicions thawed as I read through them. It's hard to work in the sector and not be excited that maybe the federal government will save public universities from their states.  It's equally hard not to be excited about real reductions of student costs and student debt, which have led to U.S. attainment declines, the unjustifiable burdening of Millennials, and other assorted evils.  More pressure to fix debt was added by a shocking St. Louis Fed report whose findings were summarized by the NYT coverage as "Racial Wealth Gap Pe...

At his blog mainly macro , the economist Simon Wren-Lewis comments on how the Labour party members who like Jeremy Corbyn  (at left) for his anti-austerity policies have been misdescribed as radical: " Talk to some, and being anti-austerity has become synonymous with being well to the left. Of course in reality it is just textbook macroeconomics, . . . [and in]  2009 . . . the need for fiscal stimulus rather than deficit reduction was the position advocated by a centre/left Labour party in the UK, and the Democrats in the US. It cannot be surprising, therefore, that among a relatively well informed electorate that is the Labour party membership an anti-austerity position is still seen as a sensible policy." The explanation for mislabeling "sensible" as radical, Prof. Wren-Lewis writes, is that while most of the Labour base stayed where it was, the Very Serious  People   in Labour have moved to the right, in the direction of austerity. Something similar happened lon...